Welcome to the world of photography

Welcome to our website, where we focus on all things photography. Here you will find ideas about creative family photography, photograph albums you can create and gifts from photos as well as a range of photography tips for all occasions.

The focus of this website is photography as it relates to family, love and relationships. The aim of the website is to show how to portray strong family relationships in the photographs you take. These can be relationships between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, grandparents and grandchildren as well as nuclear and extended or ‘patchwork’ family groups.

Capture the moment

Some of the best family photographs, or any photography related to love, have been spontaneous. Here we will help you capture the moment whether you are in a studio, at home or outdoors. Street photography can be very effective in capturing a moment of love. This could be a child witnessing snow for the first time in their life or two siblings playing together in the park. Whilst luck plays a part in capturing the best shot in these circumstances, here you will find tips and hints to help ensure you have the best possible chance for that perfect picture.

Photography enhancing relationships

Photographs of family groups, large or small, can have a considerable impact as they record the family dynamics and can enhance relationships. Photographs are like any work of art. They are produced with skill and taste, using the principles of good artistic composition. It is this artistic aspect that adds to the power of the relationships portrayed in a picture.
In family photographs the similarity of physical characteristics are clearly defined to emphasise that this is a family. The facial expressions show the group are pleased to be together and are proud of their familial ties. Dress and posture can also indicate more about the people in the family, their background, their heritage and their interests. The arrangement of the family members may also indicate status, for example the parents may be the primary focus or perhaps their children are arranged informally or by age.
The best family photographs show warm emotion; positive feelings between the group as they look comfortable together with love, affection and pride in their expressions. With the group able to come together for the photograph, the photographer already has their theme which is one of the foundation stones in creating a good portrait.
Photographs of family are also a reminder of lives shared when families are not together. When displayed, photographs show visitors close kinship, strong bonds, good times together and origins. They can also open up the opportunity for conversation, giving family members a chance to reminisce about the bonds of family ties.
The opportunities to appreciate and enjoy relationships or special occasions spent together can soon pass. Taking time to get some quality artistic images that record these meaningful relationships will be photographs to be treasured.

Our inspiration: Ugne Henriko

This website is inspired by the photography of Ugne Henriko. Ugne is a professional photographer from Lithuania, who spent three years at Cambridge School of Arts improving her photography skills and became involved with projects such as Secret Cinema presents Laura Marling during her residency in London.
Unge is famous for her mirror-image photography tribute to her mother that caught the attention of international media in 2013. This series of black-and-white photographs called ‘Mother and Daughter’ came about because Ugne wanted to explore the relationship between them. This led Unge to recreate images taken 37 years earlier, when her mother was an 18-year-old photography student in the Soviet Union. She not only wanted to explore the idea of being a "copy" of someone else, but also to observe the generational differences between them.
The images on the left each each photograph is a picture of Unge’s mother. Unge is on the right. At the time her mothers photographs were taken, she was studying art at college with her husband. Unge grew up with several boxes of photographs around the house and as a child used to spend time going through the happy photos of her parents.
Unge did not realise how closely she resembled her mother until she was a teenager. At this time she would sometimes scan the images and use them as her own photograph on social media.
When considering her major project for her final year at university in Cambridge, Unge knew she wanted to recreate some of her mother’s pictures. The pair have always been close since Unge is the only daughter and has four brothers. Unge asked her mother in Lithuania to send over all the photographs in which they look similar.
The photos Unge selected to recreate were dictated by the clothes she managed to find as she scoured charity shops for clothes similar to those worn by her mother in the photographs. Her favourite photograph from the set is the one where she mirrors her mother gazing out of the window.
The reflected portraits of herself in 2012 and her mother’s portraits taken around 1975 show the genetic and characteristic similarities between the pair. All the images on the left side are her mother and those on the right are Ugne, reflecting with incredible accuracy her mother’s original photography that at first glance you don’t realise these are separate photographs of different subjects.
Trying to pay tribute to a mother is a difficult task, but through her incredible photos, Ugne Henriko was able to translate her love into print. Her mother Laimute Vasyliene, laughed and cried at the same time when she saw the photographs and that’s what beautifully artistic portraits of people you love can do, create deep emotion and pride.
Much of Henriko’s other portrait work, including wedding photography, uses the backdrop of wild nature including windswept beaches and deserted woodlands. Yet she remains fascinated, as we are on this site, by the idea of intimacy and the relationships between people whether friends, lovers, sisters or other.